NEWSBYJESSANNE COLLINS

Cue the Weather Girls: despite monsoon rains in Kathmandu, Nepal's first international LGBT pride parade went off without a hitch last week. Hundreds of revelers gathered in the streets for the celebration, held in conjunction with the traditional festival of Gai Jatra, and lead (literally) by the country's outspoken gay parliamentarian Sunil Pant, who headed up the procession through the city's main thoroughfares atop an elephant.

According to a report posted on Monsters and Critics, the festivities drew more than 500 participants, among them local politicians, including "Nepal's first transgender politician, Bhumika Shrestha, marching down the street in a purple sari — the colour representing change," and the British Ambassador and embassy staff. While smaller events have been held over the years to coincide with Gai Jatra, a commemorative festival marked by flamboyant costumes and lively parades, this year's was the first to draw international attention and was markedly larger than those held in years past.

But Nepal's progress doesn't stop at just a good party. Pant's longstanding efforts to make the country a destination for gay tourists from abroad began to pay off earlier this month, when the first same-sex marriage of an international couple took place there. A British citizen and his Indian partner were wed by a Hindu priest in a ceremony organized by Pant's Blue Diamond Society on August 17. Priest-performed marriage ceremonies are generally accepted by Nepalese society, although the nation does not yet legally recognize same-sex marriage, something Pant is hoping to change with a bill that's currently going through parliament. Here's hoping that the new constitution slated to be enacted next year gives Nepal's LGBT community something to really celebrate.

Photo credit: jamiefromscotland

Living in New York City requires a certain immunity to a lot of minor injustices, not least among them, the bends-inducing depths street advertising descends to in its ever-desperate bid for eyeballs. Any ride on public transportation, for example, assures you’ll come face to face with a teenager in an American Apparel bodysuit and a Cirque du Soleil contortion, a faceless swath of masculine mid-section in clingy cotton, or a PETA-pocketed celeb who’d rather wear nothing than wear fur, or all of the above. In this city, sex even sells storage space.

So what’s it take to get thick-skinned New Yorkers riled up over tasteless advertising these days? Too-skinny pretzels.

Snack Factory Pretzel Crisps, to be specific, which have raised a fair amount of ire for a tasteless new campaign that appropriates the age-old Gurley-Brownism “You can never be too thin” to promote a type of new-fangled pretzelesque snack food. The ad is unassuming in its design, obnoxious in its message, and stoking more controversy than a glorified communion wafer can support.

Last week the blog EV Grieve documented the ironic pairing of two street ads in the East Village, one featuring the thin crisp pretzels and the other some thin H&M models, prompting various sites to weigh in with headlines like “Pretzel Ad Hits NYC Streets, Promotes Eating Disorders” and “Does This Pretzel Ad Encourage Anorexia?” One direct actionist even headed out to give the ad a good-old fashioned guerilla remix.

Watch out West Village: there's a new Pride parade on the planet. The tiny Himalayan nation of Nepal, also known as Asia’s new LGBT mecca, is putting a gay-friendly twist on one of its oldest traditions. And yes, there will be elephants.

Scheduled for August 25 in Kathmandu, Nepal's first ever Pride celebration is timed to coincide with the centuries-old traditional Hindu festival Gai Jatra. Sunil Pant, the country’s only gay Member of Parliament and the leader of the gay rights group the Blue Diamond Society, tells AFP that he hopes as many as 3,000 LGBT people from Nepal and neighboring countries will march.

There are plenty of obvious political reasons to support the rights of gay teenagers to date who they want to date — whether that means attending their high school prom or just kicking around the local mall in peace. But a new study suggests there’s a psychological reason as well — for LGBT teens, being in a same-sex relationship can have vital mental health benefits.

It's no secret — and no wonder — that feeling like you've got to hide your sexuality can result in lowered self-esteem and internalized homophobia, both of which can contribute to anxiety and depression. The University of Michigan School of Public Health's Sexuality and Health Lab recently examined the long-term effects of relationships on these conditions, in teens who visited New York City LGBT centers. Results showed that for LGB kids, involvement in a same-sex relationship had a “protective effect,” which manifested differently for boys and for girls. For girls, it seems being in even just one same-sex relationship can reduce internalized homophobia, while for boys, a same-sex relationship raises self-esteem, as long as the relationship is prolonged.

No one ever said life is easy for the offspring of the rich, famous, and ridiculously beautiful. Shiloh Jolie-Pitt may be blessed with an intact family, devoted parents who need no naming, and a dearth of material cares, but the price she'll pay is media scrutiny of every public move she'll ever make. And as of late, the tabloid buzz is that the 4-year-old is having something of a gender identity crisis.

In March, a Life & Style cover paired a photo of Shiloh with a cute bob and one of her with an even cuter pixie under the accusatory headline "Why is Angelina Turning Shiloh into a Boy?" setting off a flurry of transphobic chatter we covered extensively here. This week the tongue-wagging picked up anew when Angelina herself touched on the topic in a new Vanity Fair cover story, nonchalantly explaining that Shiloh "likes tracksuits, she likes [regular] suits. She likes to dress like a boy. She wants to be a boy. So we had to cut her hair. She likes to wear boys' everything. She thinks she's one of the brothers."

Never mind that the mother of six also gushed that her son Maddox is "a real intellectual," (now there's a real titillating headline: "Child of Hollywood Chooses Life of Academia!") or that she goes on to describe Shiloh as "goofy and verbal, the early signs of a performer." If you relied on headlines for your news all you'd hear this week is the endless echo that Shiloh "wants to be a boy."

If you’d spent the last three decades of a nearly 50-year medical career on the forefront of HIV treatment, running a San Francisco clinic and acting as a figurehead for the AIDS research community, you might be looking forward to a comfortable retirement right about now.

Dr. Marcus Conant wasn’t. At 73, he had no intentions of throwing in the towel. “I'd been planning to do this until my mind or my body gave up,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. But last week the renowned physician, who’s treated thousands of HIV-positive patients since he identified the first cases of Karposi’s sarcoma in 1981, closed up shop and left town.

Why the change of heart? After a decade of mounting insurance hassles, Conant was sick of the insurance headaches — finding the costs and complications of running a private practice impossible to justify. He’d even resorted to running his clinic off his personal savings. "The bottom line is, you cannot make a living practicing medicine unless you work at least 50 to 60 hours a week," he told the Chronicle. "I'm not the only doctor who's getting to the point where it's not worth it."